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Monday, 19 September 2011

LDN Aware Voices DVD

This double DVD release brings together doctors, scientists, pharmacists and patients to talk about their many and varied experiences with Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN). And these are voices worth listening to because their message is compelling. At the moment we don’t know how many patients could benefit from LDN, we don’t know how many conditions it can treat and we do not have clear idea of how it is that it works. But there is enough evidence for us all to take this seriously.

Of the many voices on the DVD some stand out. Jackie Young-Bihari, widow of the late Dr Bernard Bihari (who discovered low dose naltrexone as a treatment, initially in HIV/AIDS patients), does a great job of telling the history of LDN. It was one of those lucky accidents and Dr Bihari had the foresight not to turn away from his discovery but to take a chance and treat a wide range of patients with many different diseases, including cancer.

Also compelling is Dr Burt Berkson, who has developed an anti-cancer protocol that combines LDN and alpha-lipoic acid. Some of his case studies have been published in the peer reviewed literature. However, rather than being seized on and triggering off more formal clinical trials, the response from mainstream oncology has been pretty much to ignore the papers and the reports. A recent paper describes LDN being used to kill ovarian cancers in test tubes and mice, which is great news, but with Dr Berkson’s pre-existing work in patients we really ought to be seeing clinical trials in humans by now.

The testimony from many of the patients, which appear on the second DVD, are worth listening too. These are the people who have tried LDN and have had positive results in a cancer, MS, Crohn’s disease, HIV/AIDS, Parkinson’s, rheumatoid arthritis and other conditions. In many cases the patients describe the practical difficulties involved in getting LDN, others describe the relief of symptoms and the fear that they will one day lose access to LDN.

The aim of the LDN Research Trust is to get this DVD out to doctors all across the country. Specifically:

At this stage we do not have the formal clinical trial data that is essential, but it’s clear from this DVD and some of the peer reviewed literature that there is something going on here and something that needs urgent investigation. LDN is a low cost drug with few side effects, it deserves to be taken seriously. The drug companies exist to make a profit, but as I have said before, we pay our taxes and it’s tax-payer funded researchers who ought to be looking at LDN in the first instance.